There are two kinds of people in this world: people who have never read Annie Dillard's "Total Eclipse," and people who read it in a college seminar fourteen years ago and have not been the same since. I am the second kind. I think about it roughly once a week, usually at 2 a.m., usually against my will.
For the uninitiated — congrats on your peace — Dillard is the American essayist who won the Pulitzer in 1975 for *Pilgrim at Tinker Creek*, a book she wrote in her twenties by staring at a creek in Virginia until God showed up. She's the patron saint of noticing things. Birds, galaxies, a weasel, her own mortality. Normal Tuesday stuff.
But "Total Eclipse," published in 1982, is the one that keeps escaping the syllabus and going feral on the internet. It recounts the February 26, 1979, total solar eclipse over Washington State, which Dillard watched from a hillside in Yakima with a few hundred strangers. What happens next is roughly 4,000 words of a brilliant woman calmly describing her own psychological demolition.
The eclipse itself lasted two minutes and ten seconds. Dillard spends pages on it. "The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover," she writes. "The hole in the sky boomed." She compares the sight to a severed head, to a retina, to a coin. Then she gets to the part that lives in my skull rent-free: "It was all Andrew Wyeth," and also, the eclipse was "wrong." Not beautiful. Not sublime. *Wrong*. Like the universe had made an accounting error and briefly let us see the receipt.
Here's the thing about Dillard: she refuses to make it nice. Most nature writing performs gratitude. Dillard performs terror. She watches a total eclipse and concludes that if you were to see this phenomenon as a child, before anyone explained it to you, you would simply die. Not metaphorically. She's pretty sure the brain would just quit.
Naturally, the internet has rediscovered her. Eclipse chasers on TikTok quote her like scripture. Someone on Reddit called "Total Eclipse" "the scariest thing ever written about the sky," which is correct. Every time a big eclipse rolls through the U.S. — 2017, 2024, the next one in 2044 that I will absolutely be alive for, God willing — Dillard's essay resurfaces, gets passed around, and traumatizes a fresh batch of English majors.
And that's the real scam of Annie Dillard. She's filed under "nature writer" at Barnes & Noble, sandwiched between field guides, so nobody warns you. You pick up a nice book about trees. You put it down a different person. Her other essays do the same thing. "Living Like Weasels" is about a weasel for exactly six paragraphs and then it's about how you should bite your life's throat and never let go. "The Deer at Providencia" starts as a jungle travelogue and ends as a meditation on suffering that will hollow you out.
Dillard is 80 now. She writes less. She reportedly lives quietly, which feels on brand — she spent her whole career telling us to shut up and look at things. The eclipse is coming back regardless. So is the essay. Read it if you want. But know that you can't unsee it, and the sky will never be just the sky again.
**The Take:** Annie Dillard isn't a nature writer, she's a horror writer who happens to use sunlight instead of ghosts. If "Total Eclipse" doesn't bother you, congratulations, you're either enlightened or dead inside. Either way, you're not getting those two minutes back.